


love every stranger, the stranger the better

by parker_kingofbees



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: (gasp did i not include nico in a fic????!!!!! wow), Anyways, Gen, I HAVE NOT READ THE TOWER OF NERO YET, acearo piper, and the fact that theres nothing wrong with me if i am, however this does take place with knowledge of events from the tyrants tomb and before, not me using a character to process possible pieces of me AGAIN, seriously though this is just me contemplating the chance that im acearo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:54:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26871745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parker_kingofbees/pseuds/parker_kingofbees
Summary: a set of short thoughts as piper considers whether or not she's acearoaka comfort for myself as i come to terms with my sexuality LMAOtitle from someone new by hozier
Comments: 7
Kudos: 10





	love every stranger, the stranger the better

Piper thought she was broken.

In elementary school, most of the girls in her class would congregate on the jungle gym, sitting on monkey bars or leaning on poles or perched on whatever ledges weren’t taken, and they’d gossip about the boys they liked or the boys their friends liked or the boys the girls they didn’t like liked, and at some point a girl would ask Piper who  _ she  _ liked. And she didn’t have a real answer. For years she thought she was doing what everyone else was doing- making up an answer. She’d look over at the field where some boys were playing soccer, or over at the bench where a boy or two were reading, or anywhere else where a boy was doing something, and she’d say the name of the first boy she saw.

It was in sixth grade that she learned that wasn’t normal. She and a couple of her closer friends were at a sleepover and one of them brought up the subject of crushes. When the two sets of eyes turned expectedly to Piper, she responded “I haven’t chosen one yet this year.”

“What?” one of the girls, Lily, said, face scrunched in her confusion.

“Yeah, I haven’t picked who I’m gonna have a crush on yet. I don’t know, Jonathan seems like as good a pick as any.”

“What do you mean  _ picked _ ?” the other girl, Jane, asked.

“Don’t… we all… pick our crushes?” Piper had asked hesitantly.

“No…?” Jane answered incredulously.

Piper thought maybe she was broken.

Piper thought maybe she was broken.

She loved her friend Leo in the most platonic way possible, but she couldn’t help but feel a distinct disconnect from him. He was always crushing on this girl or that, pining over Fiona one day and over Calliope the next.

It had come as a relief to Piper, honestly, when she  _ actually  _ felt feelings similar to what Leo had always described. When the new guy arrived, and she felt a flutter in her stomach around him, she practically knelt to the ground and thanked whatever gods had done this to her. When Jason asked her out a month later, she nearly cried tears of joy-  _ she wasn’t broken!  _ It was almost too good to be true.

Then there was that fieldtrip. Everything was great, Jason was napping on her shoulder and Leo was cracking jokes as usual, and then Jason woke up. And nothing was great. Jason didn’t know who Piper and Leo were, Piper didn’t feel anything for him anymore, and then she fell off a bridge. Her teacher had goat legs and she was flying across the country in a chariot with two strange people and there was a prophecy about missing a shoe and her mother was a goddess.

Not just a goddess. Her mother was freaking Aphrodite, goddess of freaking love. And Piper couldn’t stay in love to save her life. Jason seemed to be into her for real, though. Which was problematic.

There was the quest. And finding out that her feelings for Jason had been made up. And Piper didn’t have the heart to tell Jason that she didn’t reciprocate his feelings at all. She decided to date him, thinking maybe something would come back. Maybe she could hold onto the warm fuzzies and the love and the happiness that relationship- the false memories of that relationship- had brought her.

Piper thought she was broken.

Piper realized she might not be broken.

It was a new school year, fresh from the hell of all that Gaia drama. Leo was gone, and she felt that pain every morning, but still she got up, went to school, and came home. There was no one cracking jokes or pining over their latest crush or gushing over their projects to her. There was just the disconnected silence with distant talking as she ate her lunch alone.

One day, the announcements before school advertised their school-sanctioned LGBT club. Piper was tired of being alone, and she figured as a child of Aphrodite, a place where people were celebrating how they loved was as good a place as any to find some comfort.

It was a special day for the club, she soon realized. Everyone was eager and welcoming, but the thing that really stuck out as a special event was the presentation the club had prepared.

“Asexual,” one of the club members said, standing in front of a Smartboard that was displaying a definition. “Having a lack of sexual attraction to any gender. This can be paired with other identities- such as biromantic, feeling romantic attraction to two or more genders- or with aromantic, which is the lack of romantic attraction to any gender.”

_ Oh,  _ Piper had thought.  _ Oh. _

Piper thought she might not be broken.

Piper still had her doubts.

She was asexual, yes, and aromantic, yes. That meant she couldn’t feel love, then, right? What did that make her, as a daughter of Aphrodite? When her mother’s whole domain was love and her own golden child, wielder of Katroptris and one of the Seven, couldn’t even feel it? What did that make her, as a demigod? When every demigod she knew who wasn’t interested in romance went off and joined the Hunters of Artemis, how could she be a normal demigod, ace, aro, and mortal? What did that make her, as a human? When the very thing that people claimed gave a person humanity was their ability to love, and it was something she could never feel?

Piper still had her doubts.

Piper realized she was wrong.

She found out Reyna had joined the Hunters of Artemis, and she got to thinking about them. Not thinking about joining them, but just to thinking about them. They all lived full lives. Piper would never call them missing their humanity or any lesser for their lack of interest in romance.

And besides, she felt plenty of love.

The love she felt for her father, fostered by their hours long roadtrip to Oklahoma. Bright days spent driving down long, abandoned stretches of road, singing along to the same music or retelling the old stories Piper’s grandfather told her so often. Lunches turned into picnics as an excuse to take a rest stop and stretch their legs. The tight hug Piper gave her father when they finally made it home, and the food they made that night.

The love she felt for Leo, hitting full force when she found out he was alive. Her tight hug and her tearful punch to his shoulder and her “you jerk” she said through sobs. His warm arms and his playfully exaggerated wince and his “I’m sorry” he whispered through her hair. It was their ability to mourn together the friend they both lost but neither really ever had, recounting the shenanigans a god had placed in their minds. It was their ability to acknowledge those memories, and the real ones that emerged as time passed. It was their countless inside jokes and late night talks.

The love she felt for Jason, though far was it from the kind Hera originally intended for her to feel. Tears shed over a good friend lost. Praying to Hades for his safety and permission to Elysium. Thinking long and hard for days on end, writing down each and every last story she could tell about him, and then a couple more that Leo or Percy or Reyna remembered.

The love she felt for all of her friends, mortal and demigod and Hunters and all. She felt platonic love for so many, and sisterly love for Leo, and the love a daughter feels for her father.

She was very much human, she was very much loving and loved, she just didn’t need a romantic relationship to prove that.

Piper was whole.


End file.
